Anonymous, DOS of pm.gov.au

In case you haven't heard, in response to the Australian government's proposal to implement mandatory internet filtering, the Prime Minister's website was subject to a minor Denial of Service (DoS) attack by a group of internet malcontents called Anonymous. Our PM is called Kevin Rudd, affectionately I will refer to him as KRudd in this post.

http://www.theage.com.au/technology/security/rudd-hackers-escalate-threats-against-govau-websites-20090911-fk2x.html

http://www.theage.com.au/technology/security/hacked-by-hoons-how-attack-on-pms-website-unravelled-20090910-fipj.html

http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/09/10/pm’s-website-hacked-no-just-script-kiddies/

And a quick note media, if you had googled Anonymous you would find that it is not one individual "hacker known as anonymous", but a "loose coalition of Internet denizens" "doing it for the lulz".

I like the following quote, it sort of reminds me of "flash mobs" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_mob and the "Stand Alone Complex" from Ghost in the Shell and even the Panther Moderns from Neuromancer

[Anonymous is] the first internet-based superconsciousness. Anonymous is a group, in the sense that a flock of birds is a group. How do you know they're a group? Because they're travelling in the same direction. At any given moment, more birds could join, leave, peel off in another direction entirely.
—Landers, Chris, Baltimore City Paper, April 2, 2008.[6]

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/09/10/2681642.htm

I guess its one of the good things about Australia is that we just don't really care much about our politicians. We've got royalty already, the original British kind. We don't need our politicians to look good and say inspiring stuff. We just want them to stay out of our way and continue to run universal health care, state funded mental health care etc etc.

If Obama's website had been taken off the air, the Yanks would be starting operation sundevil part 2 maybe with or without waterboarding of "digital terrorists"? When our PM's website got DOSd probably a DSD graduate had to cancel a saturday night out and go check some logs down at a hosting provider.

Of course Obama can't get DOS'd too easily because whitehouse.gov is distributed out over lots of Akamai web servers around the place. Our PM's web site is hosted on say a single windows 2008 box down at Macquarie Telecom ( lowest compliant tenderer I bet ) http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://www.pm.gov.au

So c'mon Aussie, let's all band together to hook up KRudd a website with bulletproof hosting, so that in case of ummm invasion by our northern neighbours or something he can still get a message out. If Krudd does have something to share of importance, his twitter account with a link to pm.gov.au is going to get the word out quicker than any media outlet.

I hear Telstra have a DoS protection solution, perhaps the new Telstra CEO could extend an olive branch? http://www.telstraenterprise.com/SiteCollectionDocuments/Brochures/TEGO1269_DOS_Web.pdf